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"At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write."
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"Writing. Is it a way to be remembered,or a need to become immortal?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Between the lines of every book the writer reveals their own secrets."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I would teach from nine to four, sleep an hour, and write from six until midnight, night after night."
Author Name
Personal Development
"My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born."
Parenting
"I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore...it's in the stars!"
Frustration
"Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?"
Imagination
"It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance."
Philosophy
"It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity."
Psychology
"One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me."
Regret
"Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of nothing else beyond their own survival?"
Survival
"Memory's got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember."
Life
"They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but obliterating sensation, thrilling and swelling, and the sound of fabric on fabric and skin on fabric as their limbs slid across each other in this restless, sensuous wrestling. ... They moved closer, deeper and then, for seconds on end, everything stopped. Instead of an ecstatic frenzy, there was stillness. They were stilled not by the astonishing fact of arrival, but by an awed sense of return - they were face to face in the gloom, staring into what little they could see of each other's eyes, and now it was the impersonal that dropped away."
Affection
"All day we've witnessed each other's crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?"
Crime
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